will you bring your speaker from your parents house?

summer lovers, summer dancers this is for you.

listen. the clocks go forward next week. spring is among us. i lost my job yesterday but god it feels like i can breathe!!! i wasn’t getting shifts anyway. i can finally focus all my energy on getting into working in theatre. its seventeen degrees outside and theres a passion fruit buzzball and an orange coloured building calling my name. i dont know what happens next. who will answer my call but i am safe, i am alive and there is sun drenching my body. i am so grateful. summer is just across the pond. you can feel her. come on my love, start swimming.

lynette yiadom-boakye, “the hours behind you.” 2011.

photo taken by me! essex uni campus :)

*

this and dlala thukzin blasting through a speaker someone brought from their parents house. we dont have enough blankets so there’s hoodies all over the grass and my shoes are everywhere but on my feet. i lost one of my croc jibbitz tryna learn a new dance move but we’ll call it an offering to my ancestors. let the ground swallow it.

maybe in the future someone will find it and wonder where it came from. inanimate objects can’t talk which is a shame bc it would’ve whispered to you how my legs found the soil so firmly i kicked up fairy dust.

i’m all feathers and gold.

finding a home in the darkness of the club. the music of my people ring through my ears and i can’t steady my beating heart. there is nothing except the ancestral desire to dance. to move my feet along with the melody.

the dj always smiles at me from behind their castle.

and i give them everything i got. i am the loyal subject. you have me, if there’s no one else swaying to your beat you have me. sweat gathering across my forehead, my back already drenched in it.

do you get it yet? that tiny object discovered in between dewy blades of grass long after the partiers have gone home— maybe even months after when the lawnmower has desecrated the kingdom and razed it to the ground a future someone sees it glinting and wonders what it is.

i’ll tell you:

we existed we existed we existed.

see if inanimate objects could talk it would tell you how we, with our grass covered clothes and tipsy lazy smiles, screamed HAIIIBOOO during every track, how the dancers (who are just friends who glow in the sun) shook and twirled. how the trees revelled in our laughter and whistled with us because music music music music its the sound.

the sound.

how do i explain that if you cut me open and let all the poetry fall out there’s just music notes lodged in between my organs? do you understand that?

give me hampstead heath, greenwhich park, primrose hill, olympic park on a summer day in june. i got a bag for life full of fizzy drinks and walkers crisps because we are all still eleven on our way to the school disco and its not a year six leavers party if theres no crisps, fizzy drinks and oh-

someone brought mini sausage fingers from m&s.

i am eleven again. in a grey dress because i loved it. my hair up because i loved it. no makeup except lip gloss. i am bubbly and i feel that unobstructed, glorious, uncontainable, unmatchable feeling of childish happiness. i do not know that i will be looking for this feeling for the rest of my life. i do not know yet, for i am too busy living it.

give me hyde park but only on the 20th of the fourth month because i got into a habit once and never broke it. (i dont even smoke that much anymore)

give me st james, regents and holland park on an evening of someones birthday where the cake almost got battered by a frisbee.

give me brockwell and victoria park during festival season.

actually give me victoria park on every humid evening. you know thats the best park to walk around aimless and thoughtless. follow the ducks and think about how you are not the first to do this, and you will never be the last.

a memory crashes through and dances along the ridges of my brain, do you remember hiring those paddle boats. do you remember how the sun hung lazily in the sky. do you remember the scream when we nearly overturned avoiding that swan. do you remember remember remember...

i can’t tell you about my city in the summer i can only show you and by show you i mean give me your entire day. dress up in your shorts and assortment of jewellery. you in silver me in gold. let your braids roll down to your waist and i’ll give you my hair store mango scented lipgloss when you ask. bring your speaker from your parents house we’ll choose a song, we’ll share a lighter, a cigarette, a spliff. if you come with me i will paint this city in the colours of all our flags. i’ll tell you about how we couldn’t club before we turn eighteen so the parks were where i learnt to put my waist to good use. i will tell you how my friends and i spent our last few days of the summer holiday with a zip card hopping on and off buses, on and off trains trying to chase away seventeen.

in august we create a storm.

have you ever seen a tidal wave of black beautiful bodies shaking to the music that followed your people on a boat? i’m not caribbean but for a weekend i am. the central line is bursting with colour and if you didn’t know it was carnival weekend you do now- from stratford to lancaster gate we are family family family. my phone rings and we’re tryna find each other in the throng of people. awkward and out of place but essentially- most importantly at home.

we are all family until its time to catch that whine and then i dont know you but i’d like to. your fingers tighten across my waist and you pull me closer and i’m not supposed to be dreaming like this but the girl who’s body is behind mine is so happy, so black and sparkly that i think about the fairy dust from last month i kicked into the air, the dust that covered my lost jibbit. i think that we really are all magic. they’re tryna steal our fire but i watched sinners and i know not to just let any body in.

but its just march.

and i’m getting ahead of myself,

bc its not summer until i start weaving flowers into my braids. its not summer until i’m sat in a park with the nastiest amapiano mix youtube can serve me blasting through speakers someone brought from their parents house.